Archive - Conference Papers

Global Security Challenges and the Protection of Individual Rights The ECJ at the Crossroads between National, Regional and Universal Interests

Stanislas Adam

The EC exclusive competence regarding external trade and the birth of a political Union made it unavoidable for the ECJ to deal with global security issues. This allowed first and foremost the development of a case-law circumscribing not only the competences of the EC/EU to defend international peace and security but also the extent to which a Member State can infringe Community rules for security purposes. Arguably, much depends on the existence or not of a UN Security Council Resolution and EC/EU implementing measures. Recently, the increasing terrorist threat made it more and more difficult to identify governments who should be sanctioned for breaches of international human rights' and humanitarian law. This difficulty, combined with the willingness to avoid disproportionate harmful consequences for innocent peoples, eventually led to "smart sanctions" directed towards a limited number of individuals. At the EC/EU level, this evolution shifted the attention on the way the European institutions apply such individual sanctions and on the role played by the ECJ and the national judges when individuals question their conformity with fundamental rights. The main research question of the proposed paper is to examine whether the ECJ case-law results in a consistent approach of these various problems, in particular regarding international terrorism.

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